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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

>If your eyes aren't on the road, you aren't driving.

>I have zero sympathy for any of the edge cases people tend to bring up except checking your speed.

You're saying the speedometer is the only instrument that needs to be scanned regularly?

I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.

It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.

And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.

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> You're saying the speedometer is the only instrument that needs to be scanned regularly?

In practice, I'd hazard a yes.

Keyword: regularly...unless you're driving something that's pissing oil all over the place and/or has a cooling system that's out of service, at which point you clearly have much bigger maintenance problems and probably shouldn't be on the road with that vehicle anyways (perhaps even in a lawful sense).

> I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.

The obvious naivety here is a dependency on another driver ahead of you both maintaining situational awareness and doing the right thing...never mind sparse traffic scenarios, e.g. super late/early hours, neighborhoods, small towns, rural areas, etc. In the case of incident, the police won't care; your insurance provider won't care.

> It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.

Contrived. There's a reason why high-contrast event indicators (termed "telltale" as defined by US FMVSS statutory regulation[1]) baked directly into every passenger vehicle which control for permissible location, identification, color, and illumination targeting driver visibility. These discrete telltales are explicitly designed to ping a driver's peripheral vision with the intent of eliminating a need for active monitoring in practice.

[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...

I actually have had the speedometer break on my car. There's no idiot light to tell you it's broken, let alone that it's going to break.

I never had to use it as an excuse.

While you're underway there aren't many other things you should be keeping an eye on, but that was an absolutist stance to make a point. I know people are going to be glancing at fuel or temperature or whatever.

> I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble

That's really location specific, and situation specific. We can't go over ~5kmph faster than the limit here without getting fined by speed cameras. Also 10kmph faster on a highway versus 10kmph faster in town are very different. 10kmph faster in town could be the difference between killing someone or not hitting them at all.

I do somewhat agree though, I think "driving to the conditions" for me personally would be totally fine, I'd probably trend to driving slower than the speed limit. But if you had no limit and no enforcement, people would be abusing it all the time. Someone in a hurry in town would easily cause trouble. The tradeoff for limiting that is having to check your speedometer.

10kmph = 6.2mph.

>10kmph faster in town could be the difference between killing someone or not hitting them at all.

I think of the difference between hitting someone and not hitting them as measured in distance, not speed.

Speed determines time to stop including stopping distance and reaction time. For every second of reaction time per 10kmph you add about 4 meters of distance travelled before you even hit the brakes. So best case if you aren't looking at your HVAC, at 50kmph you will start the stopping process in about 28 meters, and at 60kmph it will be 33.3m and take longer to stop once you hit the pegs.

Doesn't sound like heaps but that is actually your margin for error, just 4m. If something jumps out in front of you at 28 meters away, at 50 you will have had 4 meters to stop, which modern cars can do, and at 60 you will hit them at the full 60kmph. The Australian government has some great road safety clips on the subject, I might try and find them.

> It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.

> And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.

I forgot to address these sorry.

I've driven some pants cars in my time so I get it, but I'd say you be the judge of just how distracted you are with mechanical worries and if that's a safe amount or not.

I think HVAC being on tactile controls makes the difference here, but ultimately you could check them when you've stopped if it's too much of a hassle. Sometimes I try to get it set, but can't figure it out quickly, so give up and just set it at the next point I'm idling.

There's an implicit message from new cars having lane-keeping features that we as a society (whichever society) are going to compensate for distractions rather than cracking down.

I agree. It's too hard to police without invasive cameras or tracking.

Unfortunately in AU too many people speed. Going with the flow would result in a few fines I’d rather not have.

If you drive at the 49th percentile of speed, you would expect financially burdensome fines on a regular basis?

This may be naive, but I've assumed that it is practically impossible to enforce laws that a majority of the population habitually breaks.

Australia is a unique situation, the fines are enormous, and policing speed is a top priority for law enforcement here. Lots of automated cameras and hidden mobile cameras. My last speeding fine for < 10km over was $786. You only get to do that four times before losing your license temporarily, so you can't just pay the fines and be on your way either. Their goal is zero road fatalities.

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